Extracts from a paper by Dr William Shepard, Associate Professor of Religious Studies (Retired), University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
[Article written & published in the late 1990s]

SB challenged us all: “What are you willing to do to prevent New Zealand from going down the same path as the UK where criticism of Islam is suppressed and those who speak up are harassed by the police, have their families members targeted in an attempt to silence them and are even sent to prison where their lives are put in danger?”

Before speaking up it is good to be informed so this short series of posts will hopefully assist in this education.

A Muslim and mosque

Introduction

The Muslim community in New Zealand is small, [as at 1990], remote and relatively new, but in the last quarter century it has become an effectively organised and has grown vigourously.[…]

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

Patrick Moore, Canadian activist, founding member and former president of Greenpeace has publicly criticised the environmental movement for abandoning science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.

During a visit to Paris in December 2017 he was interviewed by an independent journalist, Grégoire Canlorbe, for the French “Association des climato-réalistes”.

Although what Patrick said is good it falls well into the tl;dr category so I have broken it up into a series of seven posts with, broadly, one topic per post and minimal additional comment as Patrick has covered the issues quite eloquently on his own.

Come Reason Ministries

One of the contradictions of the environmental green movement is that they’re using all these modern techniques of internet and social media, and just modern society, they’re using the energy that has been produced from the fossil fuels every day of their lives, whether it’s to manufacture the bicycle they’re riding on or to run the television they’re looking at. They’re using all these fruits of modern civilization, while at the same time condemning modern civilization.

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

Virtually the entire media complex megaphoned a 2017 report by Soros-backed news outlet ProPublica, and to a lesser extent a similar report in the New York Times, claiming that Trump’s new pick to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, oversaw a “clandestine base” in Thailand.[…]

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

Well, we are not far off that edict if the latest from University of New Hampshire new “Bias-Free Language Guide” is to be believed. [UNH President Mark Huddleston has disavowed the Bias-Free Language Guide, saying he is “troubled by many things” it contains. He says “[t]he only UNH policy on speech is that it is free and unfettered on our campuses.”] /Tui

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

Patrick Moore, Canadian activist, founding member and former president of Greenpeace has publicly criticised the environmental movement for abandoning science and logic in favour of emotion and sensationalism.

During a visit to Paris in December 2017, he was interviewed by an independent journalist, Grégoire Canlorbe, for the French “Association des climato-réalistes”.

Although what Patrick said is good it falls well into the tl;dr category so I have broken it up into a series of seven posts with, broadly, one topic per post and minimal additional comment as Patrick has covered the issues quite eloquently on his own.

carmeuse.eu

For ever since humans have been around, there’s always someone who is predicting doom, “the end is coming” and this to me is only an internal reflection on their own short life, they’re afraid of dying and so they project that on the all world, they’re afraid of the world dying. This is not going to happen, the world will be here for a very long time and it will remain green and beautiful for a very long time as well. Except, it wouldn’t remain so green and beautiful if the carbon dioxide ran out, in other words, was all used up.

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

China is Making Solar Farms That Will Look Like Adorable Cartoon Pandas

This just in from James Temple, Senior Editor: Energy, in the sustainable energy section of the MIT Technology Review

At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system. Here are the real reasons we’re not building clean energy anywhere near fast enough.

Fifteen years ago, Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he did a quick calculation to see how we’re doing.

Not well. Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.

At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries. In the meantime, temperatures would soar, melting ice caps, sinking cities, and unleashing devastating heat waves around the globe.

Oh noes, the sky is falling, the sky is falling …

Caldeira stresses that other factors are likely to significantly shorten that time frame (in particular, electrifying heat production, which accounts for a more than half of global energy consumption, will significantly alter demand).

What a wonderful, idea: “Solar heating is the most efficient home heating system on all three criteria, and electric is the least efficientand least affordable.”

But he says it’s clear we’re overhauling the energy system about an order of magnitude too slowly, underscoring a point that few truly appreciate: It’s not that we aren’t building clean energy fast enough to address the challenge of climate change. It’s that—even after decades of warnings, policy debates, and clean-energy campaigns—the world has barely even begun to confront the problem.

Perhaps because there isn’t actually a problem?

The UN’s climate change body asserts that the world needs to cut as much as 70 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions by midcentury to have any chance of avoiding 2 ˚C of warming. But carbon pollution has continued to rise, ticking up 2 percent last year.

So what’s the holdup?

In a word: Money.

Beyond the vexing combination of economic, political, and technical challenges is the basic problem of overwhelming scale. There is a massive amount that needs to be built, which will suck up an immense quantity of manpower, money, and materials.

For starters, global energy consumption is likely to soar by around 30 percent in the next few decades as developing economies expand. (China alone needs to add the equivalent of the entire US power sector by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.) To cut emissions fast enough and keep up with growth, the world will need to develop 10 to 30 terawatts of clean-energy capacity by 2050. On the high end that would mean constructing the equivalent of around 30,000 nuclear power plants—or producing and installing 120 billion 250-watt solar panels.

Energy overhaul

What we should be doing*

What we’re actually doing†

Megawatts per day

1,100

151

Megawatts per year

401,500

55,115

Megawatts in fifty years

20,075,000

2,755,750

Years to add 20 Terrawatts

50

363

Sources: Carnegie Institution, Science, BP

*If we had started at this rate in 2000

†Actual average rate of carbon-free added per day from 2006-2015

There’s simply little financial incentive for the energy industry to build at that scale and speed while it has tens of trillions of dollars of sunk costs in the existing system.

“If you pay a billion dollars for a gigawatt of coal, you’re not going to be happy if you have to retire it in 10 years,” says Steven Davis, an associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.

It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to see how any of that will change until there are strong enough government policies or big enough technology breakthroughs to override the economics.[…]

And there you have it: “strong enough government policies”. Tax and control.

[…]Arguably the most crucial step to accelerate energy development is enacting strong government policies. Many economists believe the most powerful tool would be a price on carbon, imposed through either a direct tax or a cap-and-trade program. As the price of producing energy from fossil fuels grows, this would create bigger incentives to replace those plants with clean energy.

“If we’re going to make any progress on greenhouse gases, we’ll have to either pay the implicit or explicit costs of carbon,” says Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Carbon credits, ETS, carbon pricing, tax on exhaling and so on.

So should we just give up?

That would certainly get my vote.

There is no magic bullet or obvious path here. All we can do is pull hard on the levers that seem to work best.

Don’t forget to pull hard on the handle of your wheeled suitcase as you jet off to the next climate conference.

Environmental and clean-energy interest groups need to make climate change a higher priority, tying it to practical issues that citizens and politicians do care about, like clean air, security, and jobs.

And the link between those is what exactly? Apart from the fact that expensive energy threatens security and jobs.

Investors or philanthropists need to be willing to make longer-term bets on early-stage energy technologies.[…]

And then lose their money like:

The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies: (*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.)

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

Patrick Moore, Canadian activist, founding member and former president of Greenpeace has publicly criticised the environmental movement for abandoning science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.

During a visit to Paris in December 2017 he was interviewed by an independent journalist, Grégoire Canlorbe, for the French “Association des climato-réalistes”.

Although what Patrick said is good it falls well into the tl;dr category so I have broken it up into a series of seven posts with, broadly, one topic per post and minimal additional comment as Patrick has covered the issues quite eloquently on his own.

Image:OMICS International

Do you believe the Kremlin, along with the Trump administration, has become a front-runner in the fight against climate change totalitarianism?

Yes, it’s been very obvious for some time that the Russians, particularly Russian scientists, do not believe that man-made climate change has been a catastrophe of some kind.

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

In a generous effort to assist the RadioNZ writers I have whipped up a quick cut and paste re-work of a story for them:

ChicagoNow

Russell McVeagh Labour is in the spotlight over serious sexual misconduct complaints levelled at two senior lawyers someone at its Wellington office Young Labour Camp two years a month ago, and separate revelations of alcohol-fuelled sex in a boardroom. unsupervised partying.

The firm Labour Party has asked Dame Margaret Bazley Maria Berryman to head an external review of the allegations, and the firm’s Labour Party’s lame response.

Hundreds of Absolutely zero students dressed in black, waved banners, and chanted as they marched to Russell McVeagh’s Labour’s Wellington office.

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

Patrick Moore, Canadian activist, founding member and former president of Greenpeace has publicly criticised the environmental movement for abandoning science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.

During a visit to Paris in December 2017 he was interviewed by an independent journalist, Grégoire Canlorbe, for the French “Association des climato-réalistes”.

Although what Patrick said is good it falls well into the tl;dr category so I have broken it up into a series of seven posts with, broadly, one topic per post and minimal additional comment as Patrick has covered the issues quite eloquently on his own.

It was at [an Environmental Liaison Center meeting in 1982] that I heard for the first time in my life the term “sustainable development.” That term had been coined earlier in the day at a meeting between environmentalists from the industrial countries and environmentalists from the developing countries.

DOC Research Institute

Most people think sustainable development was a compromise between environmentalists and industrialists, the development part, but no. It was a compromise among environmentalists, because if you’re an environmentalist in a developing country, you cannot be against development. Whereas most of the environmental people from the industrial countries were basically against mega-projects and developments like large dams and nuclear power plants, huge construction projects they were always opposing, and still do today. But in developing countries, if you’re against development, you are laughed away from the room, because developing countries are developing and that’s all there is to it, they’re trying to have a better life for their citizens and more wealth for their countries.

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.

(How often do the pesky facts have to get in the way before these people get the message that they are on a hiding to nowhere?)

Bjørn Lomborg, author and researcher, has done a “deep dive” into the International Disaster Database and posted his findings on Facebook.

Fewer and fewer people die from climate-related natural disasters.

This is clearly opposite of what you normally hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds and better accessibility (the CNN effect). For instance, for Denmark, the database only shows events starting from 1976.

Dr Seuss may have been describing WH when he wrote, “He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.” WH, however, is tallish and only just fits in his MG.